Tag: Stephen Baxter

So there were things I really liked and things I really hated about this book.

The science works well, from the physical construction of the new world around Proxima Centauri (Per Ardua, named for the RAF motto Per Ardua Ad Astra, through adversity to the stars), is a well-visualized and well thought out world with an interesting population of alien creatures. Back in the solar system, things work just as well, with a good mixture of extrapolated technology and technology indistinguishable from magic that makes hard SF set a couple of centuries in the future work.

And I like several of the characters, two of my favourites (for completely different reasons) being artificial beings. I’d like to know more about Yuri’s past than we eventually get, but the gradual reveal of important bits works for the story.

On the other side of things, and these will take longer, are the things I don’t like.

The story has too many jumps in time, making big gaps in the narrative. This looks like an attempt to skip a lot of supposedly boring bits where nothing really happens to the characters but life. Not a new idea, and it’s been used well in the past, but it doesn’t work for me for some reason.

I find the idea of colonizing another world (in another solar system) the same way the British colonized Australia in the 18th century, with criminals and forced transportees, completely unrealistic. There would be no shortage of volunteers, regardless of the ease of finding people you don’t want to keep around anyway.

The sexual/gender dynamics in the book are disturbing, at least, though that may be at least partially a natural outgrowth of the manner of people the author mostly populated the story with. Misogynistic doesn’t seem to be too strong a word here, though. Women are more or less property, and the violence, abuse and rape allowed to happen indiscriminately on the transport ship under the eyes of the guards and crew is extremely disappointing from a storytelling perspective. It doesn’t get any better when the colonists are dropped on the planet.

On the political side of things, we have an escalated version of the Cold War, only with bigger technology and worse potential outcomes. No worry of Mutually Assured Destruction here, though there should have been, and how the destruction comes about is something that everyone involved in the planning should have foreseen. I hate it when a plot hinges on smart people doing stupid things.

Overall rating: not quite 3 stars, but definitely more than 2½. Proxima cliffhangers very well, but I’m not sure I’m keen on where it seems to be leading. No spoilers from me, but looks like it’s going to be a ridiculously overused trope. It was billed as the first book in a trilogy

Part of the problem of this being an incomplete story on its own is the primary storylines being only vaguely related, stretching the definition of vaguely a bit. There are only a couple of points of contact. I’m going to assume things come together more in the second book. Or maybe the third to wrap things up.